Neither bound by law nor easily identifiable with the realm of
necessity, neither easily unveiled nor separable from the realm of
the gods, phusis in Greek antiquity, is—to coin a
phrase—said in many ways. From its hapax legomenon in
Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the mysterious
pharmacological properties of the Moly plant (10.305), to its
concealed flowering in the peri phuseōs writings of
the Pre-Socratic philosophers, it arrives in a systematic
elaboration in the works of Aristotle for whom it designates a
realm of movement, and becomes coterminous with teleology. There
are also the determinations of phusis in the medical
works of Hippocrates and Galen, its use by Herodotus to designate
national character (“the Persians are by nature
[phusin] hubristic and lack money” [1.89.2]), to say
nothing of the way it refers to the order of birth and kinship in
tragedy: across texts and genres, then, phusis moves
in ambiguous ways both in itself and in its relation to human life.
And there is the field of that which phusis opposes:
nomos, custom or law, and technē, craft
or art, the doings and makings of man as opposed to the productions
or generations of nature. Phusis is the noun form
derived from phuō, ‘to grow, to be born.’ It is often
used in vegetal contexts, indicating growth and rootedness in the
earth, but may also refer to one’s natural origins—relations of
kinship or blood—and points toward something like an
incontrovertible yet fugitive inner essence, the
phusis that “loves to hide,” as Heraclitus reminds us
in one of his most resonant fragments (B123 DK). Empedocles boldly
declares phusis to be merely a name given by men to
the “mixing and interchange” of the elements (21/8). One might say
that it designates those processes into which and by which we are
thrown, that realm of being over which we have little or no
control, and yet it is to be sharply distinguished from
moira, lot or fate. As phusis emerges in
the discourses of the phusikoi, the ancient
philosophers of nature, it also comes to bear the metaphysical
significance of being as such, and perhaps, as Gerard Naddaf has
argued, may also indicate the totality of the process by which the
current situation (the human world of ethics and politics, as well
as the natural world) of the Greek writers investigating it came
into being. My concern in what follows is not, however, to uncover
a determinate field of meaning or a precise denotation for
phusis, nor to write a definitive genealogy. Rather, I
want to trace the profound and decisive shift phusis
undergoes in Aristotle’s thought relative to its earlier life in
pre-Platonic philosophical and literary discourses, one in which
the problematic of sexual difference takes center stage.

I begin by turning to Martin Heidegger’s 1939 essay, “Vom Wesen
und Begriff der Φὐσις: Aristoteles, Physik B, I.” Heidegger’s
interest in Aristotle’s Physics, which he calls the
“hidden, and therefore never adequately studied, foundational book
of Western philosophy” (185), stems in the first instance from its
attentiveness to the problem of motion, kinēsis, as
ontologically primary. Heidegger quotes a sentence from
Physics A 2 to illustrate: Ἡμῖν δ’ ὑποκείσθω τὰ φύσει
ἢ πάντα ἢ ἔνια κινούμενα εἶναι· δῆλον δ’ ἐκ τῆς ἐπαγωγῆς
(185a12–14). A precise and prosaic translation is given by Apostle:
“We, on the other hand, make the assumption that things existing by
nature are in motion, either all or some of them; and this is clear
by induction”; but Heidegger’s more distinctive version runs as
follows: “But from the outset it should be (a settled issue) for us
that those beings that are by φύσις, whether all of them or some of
them [those not in rest], are moving beings (i.e., determined by
movedness). But this is evident from an immediate ‘leading toward’
(that leads toward these beings and over
and beyond them to their ‘being’)” (186). Here, then, Heidegger is
claiming that beings that are by phusis have
“movedness” not just as a matter of fact. That is, natural things
don’t just happen to be in motion or at rest, but motion is part of
their way of being in a way that is ontologically decisive...

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